I have to say that I believe the halo effect is real - at least it is to me. A long-time windows pc user, I just bought an iPod 6 months ago. I loved it so much, and was so impressed with it's design and ease of use, that I just purchased a new iMac G5.

It'a an amazing machine and I can now see why the Mac faithful are so faithful. I love my new iMac and OS X is amazing.

I can say that I know at least one couple who have switched because of the iPod. They bought 2 iPods, and are now planning to buy a new iMac G5 next month. Simply because of the ease of use of the iPod.

Sales of iMac = intrinsic + halo effect

Last quarter iMac sale = 50k. If current quarter is 150k, what portion is due to halo effect and what portion is due to intrinsic? We need to estimate the number upfront otherwise we will be guilty of rationalizing the number.

My estimate is intrinsic = 100k, halo effect = 50k, total = 150k.

Great, someone just said 6 months after buying an iPod, he bought a Mac.

I haven't actually seen a halo effect from the iPod. But what I am seeing is just a general increase in Mac interest. A few years ago I would never have considered a Mac and I only knew 1 person who owned one. Today, slowly, 1 by 1 people at work and friends are getting a Mac. I have a number of friends who don't have lots of extra money hanging around but are trying to save up for a Mac. These people are "power user" types and have been attracted by OS X and the amaing hardware as opposed to an experience with an iPod. But it seems logical that your average "check email and chat" person isn't going to feel married to Windows, so the enjoyment they get from their iPod will probably get them to look at Macs. So all in all I think we will see the number of Mac users grow significantly but slowly.

All this halo talk has got me hankering to fire up the ol' XBox.

I'm also seeing that the younger a person is, the more open they are to the idea of using a mac, if not already using one. Maybe it's just the people I know, but the older they are, the more they either scoff at the mac, or are unable to have a coherent discussion about the key differences.

*shrug*

Also, if it's a halo affect, I think it's simply because of the higher visibility of the brand of Apple, not just the actual sales of iPod.

This is something that is going take patience. Like the analyst said, this only the beginning. The iPod only truly began to take off in sales within the past 1.5 years - at the introduction of the iTMS and 3G iPod. Also, many people are not going to throw out a brand new computer and will wait until it's upgrade time before buying considering to switch.

This quarter will be good for Apple, no doubt about it. But it will be within the next two years, when we will see more momentum building up behind the Mac.

Patience is a virtue. Remember that. Apple has.

+

In addition to a real or perceived halo effect from the iPod, I've seen first-hand lifetime Windows users considering a Mac for their homes due to The Redmond Effect; namely, the security issues plaguing Windows. People are sick of the worms, viruses, pop-ups, and spyware, making the switch to Mac all the more attractive.

As the resident Mac expert at my day job, I'm getting a lot of inquiries regarding Macs, especially compatibility questions with Office, so I know the interest is there. Also, I agree with what Guest said regarding age differences. Older people -- myself included (39) -- no doubt remember when Macs used no open standards, when compatibility with Word required translation filters, and when networking with Windows was a nightmare. Those same people look at Macs -- with no knowledge of OS X -- and have their impressions shaped by the beige-box years of the past.

Younger people know an Apple of iMacs, iPods, iBooks, and OS X. Plus, young people today are truly the Internet-world wide web generation (I used to work for CompuServe...remember them????), and nothing equalizes platforms quite like the web.

Add to that the fact that Apple is now a media darling (and no longer that "beleagured" computer company), and it's no wonder more and more people will be moving to the Mac. Everything is working in Apple's favor right now, even their ability to keep up with demand. That's about as good a shot at increasing market share as they're going to get.

I have also seen the halo effect directly myself. My daughter has a classmate who was all PC. Then the classmate got an iPOD, then she gave up her PC habits and got a 15in Powerbook, and today she is a total convert and actively recruiting others to switch.

The other indication is that the Apple store in Chestnut Hill Mall in Boston is always mobbed. There is a lot of interest and people are going to the Apple store. The strange thing is that the Apple displays at the Micro Center in Cambridge and Comp USA elsewhere in greater Boston are not busy. If one just go to those places one would get a very distorted picture of how the Apple products are selling.

While everything was doom & gloom for Apple, the press had a field day predicting the death of Apple as an also ran (despite their being there first,) and how nobody in their right mind would buy an Apple.

Now that the iPod, the ITMS and OS X are cross platform hits, Apple is still innovating, changing their product line, changing colors, changing their marketing style (bought at an Apple store? "The Gap" of computing?) and sill NOT going after the same thing everybody else is, (the corporate marke.

OS X is Unix after all, much to Sun's chagrin, and Windows is merely a "cheapest solution insecure mess" that businesses buy to keep the bottom line low,

They can come into their own in the home by becoming, not invisible but a stylish piece of goods.

While Windows is driving the price point for hardware down, and benefitting Apple since they now use standard configs, the very strategy that Microsoft benefitted from, lowering the price point, is going to be their undoing.

Apple makes the hardware. They just happen to have a great OS, ITMS, iPod and style. Of these, the last is still the most important and Microsoft can't copy it because, they can only drive prices down, which leads to everybody buyong the cheapest case to build their boxes around. There is currently only less than a hand full of case makers in Taiwan and China making cases. In only three or four models. That severely limits your selection.

Microsoft is very customer driven but their customer base is on the desktop in the business of business and not dedicated to the same market Apple is.

They'll never make it in real-time dedicated, mission critical applications. Would YOU trust a car driven by a Microsoft OS? How about it controlling an XRay machine? The potential for lawsuits are staggering.

That market belongs to proven, secure technology: Unix. And guess what? OS X IS unix. It also happens to be in near cutting-edge boxes (well, the iMac is only a screen and a pedestal or a wall mount.) But they don't approach it the same way. Apple is being dragged reluctantly into it.

Microsoft might WANT to be there but their strategy of cutting costs has made their own customers (the hardware making OEMs) incapable of creating one. The OEMs are sufficiently empovrished that they can only 'steal' the idea and that's against the law.

Yes. The future belongs to innovators.

Likewise I don't know if there is a halo effect, but definitely there are long time windows users switching. In my company I was the lone Mac voice in the wilderness. Now I know 5 people including our resident IT guy who have bought Macs. Even more telling is their ordering 8 iBooks for the route guys to use in place of their existing wintel laptops. (This is a company with over 300 wintel units in use.) <G>

I have seen similar things happening among friends and acquaintances. My youngest is 20 and solidMac fan. She has personally had three of her college classmates switch after coming over and seeing her iMac FP in use, with an iPod and an iSight and windows compatability.

There is a shift going on with Joe and Suzie Public. The next couple of years should tell a lot.

Just after I recieved my G5 iMac I bought a copy of Halo and have been suffering from it's affects ever since!
Happy Thanksgiving all!

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podman wrote:
Just after I recieved my G5 iMac I bought a copy of Halo and have been suffering from it's affects ever since!
Happy Thanksgiving all!

A lot of people are forgetting that Apple has sold in history mainly to his established base. This means that the profile of sales is following the pace of introduction of successful new products.
Last peak was in 2000 (7983 M$, +30% on previous year) with the introducton of iMac
i believe we'll see the same effect in 2005. Lot of people replacing their old 2000 imac with the flat screen g5 imac of 2005.
As a result sales will go up and the stock price will soar because people will not be able to part this cycle effect from the halo effect.

The article above highlights a common confusion: "most recently, Apple's global market share for sales of new systems fell to a paltry 1.8 percent". If the total units sold per quarter were static and 'unit' = computer for desktop use, then this would be a cause for concern.

It's not.

The first question is whether Apple is selling more units than previously. This is generally true, although there have been some hiccups. So more new Macs are being sold than previously. Healthy.

The second question is whether Apple is even competing in the same market. In my workgroup, everyone's personal machine is a Mac laptop. However, we've also got a couple of XP boxes (specialised hardware design applications) and a bunch of low-end servers running various Unix varieties. The two XP boxes could be considered lost sales, but there was no choice since the particular application isn't Mac enabled. In contrast, the Unix boxes aren't lost sales to Apple because they're not producing cheap PCs for Unix hacking; their only server product is in a different league.

The interesting question is how many people are buying Macs for their desktop vs other brands, not total sold.

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acdc1174 wrote:
I am suffering form the Halo 2 effect...not the same thing I don't think.

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Mace wrote:
Sales of iMac = intrinsic + halo effect

Last quarter iMac sale = 50k. If current quarter is 150k, what portion is due to halo effect and what portion is due to intrinsic? We need to estimate the number upfront otherwise we will be guilty of rationalizing the number.

My estimate is intrinsic = 100k, halo effect = 50k, total = 150k.

Great, someone just said 6 months after buying an iPod, he bought a Mac.

So you are expecting iMac + eMac = 250k + 100k = 350k.

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... In terms of the halo effect, it will first be seen in iBooks, then iMacs...

I say 250k iMacs, 100k eMacs.

Last year Apple sold 829,000 CPUs in the Christmas quarter of which 227,000 were iMacs/eMacs. I see well over one million Macs shipped this quarter, perhaps over 1,100,000 CPUs.

Maybe some people that cannot afford a new Mac are buying them refurbished/used. It doesn't count for the market share because it's not a new computer but he/she does count as a "Switcher". In this case, the "Halo effect" is working, even though the market share is not growing.

Maybe some people that cannot afford a new Mac are buying them refurbished/used. It doesn't count for the market share because it's not a new computer but he/she does count as a "Switcher". In this case, the "Halo effect" is working, even though the market share is not growing.

P.S: Sorry for the duplicated post, but i forgot to register before posting my opinion.

I was on a business trip and was dying for a "MP3 player" to pass the travel time. The iPod looked "cool", so I picked one up (a 3G, 15GB). Even though I was stuck with MusicMatch as a jukebox / management tool -- this was before iTunes was avaialble for Windows -- I thought the device itself was superbly designed.

So much so, that a month later I purchased a MDD G4. I'm now on a dual 2.5 G5, and will NEVER go back to Windows!

Apple could accelerate the halo effect if it included a $50 - $150 coupon towards the purchase of a Mac OS system inside every iPod box.

The coupon could be scaled to be $50, $100 or $150 depending on what system you purchased or how much your total purchase was.

According to Appleinsider, iMac G5 is outselling iBook by 5 to 1. I went to AppleStore Europe and noted that iMac G5 is ranked #2, iPod mini #3 and iBook #5. Also noted that over 700k iMac was sold in Q1 2000, total Mac sold = 1,377 units. So 350k for iMac G5 may be a low estimate.

Note: In US, all top 10 are iPods and its accessories.

I was surfing the net the other day looking for anecdotal evidence to quote. I found something interesting at

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=cpustats

I find it interesting because of the large worldwide sampling base. I felt that if conventional wisdom holds true, we should see the same 1.8 percent (or close to it) represented here.

The choices for the discrepancy are:

1. Proportionally, Mac users (worldwide) are more interested in this kind of endeavor.
2. A lot (an awful lot) of Windows machines are not being used.
3. The actual quoted market percentages are way off mark.

To muddy the waters more, bear in mind there is no OS 9 version. So users of OS 9 only machines are not included.

So I have to ask. What does this mean? If this were a local survey then I would expect local factors to influence the result. But this is worldwide. There is no policy to ‘invite’ Mac users over windows users. As a matter of fact, the linux and windows versions were available long before the OS X version.

Or maybe the 1.8 percent represents for every computer ever sold. Meaning the PC that my neighbor purchased 12 years ago and threw in the trash 10 years ago is still counted.

I would like to see a real statistical analysis. These numbers are too off the mark.

I took my father in law into the Apple Store at Woodfield Saturday and he walked out with an iMac. It wasn't the halo effect, it was two years of hard work to convince him. He had recently decided to get a new computer. I thought I had him and then he announced he wanted Windose again. His wife immediately told him that was a bad idea (I had already convinced her). On the way in to Woodfield, she told him that she wanted to buy him a new computer for Christmas since he was so frustrated with his old one, but she'd only pay for it if he got a Mac. Between my answering EVERY objection he threw at me and his wife's kick in the pants, he got the iMac.

On the other hand, my company's computer consultant (a die-hard windose guy) told me that he has a client whose daughter is insisting on a Mac. They are the "IN" thing now, and I'd guess that's the halo effect.

I had been a PC user for the last 10yrs, working in corporate technical positions. Bought the new iMac G5, the coolest example is a complete DVD I made of a recent trip. Complete with video, pictures and music - Windows users routinely reply - How can I do that on my PC?

The answer is, unless your willing to put in hard time to figure it out, you won't. I built my movie (learning the software and operating system from the ground up) in a weekend.

Don't mess with mac - this is what people want to do with their home technology, document their lives and interestes. Not become nerds.

Welcome abroad Guest. Enjoy your trip and iMac G5.